Modern Magic1 |
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
THOMAS HUXLEY
Simon During’s Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic is that contradictory text, a learned account of the origins of forms of ‘modern’ popular entertainment. Simon During is interested in ‘secular’ magic. By this he means primarily forms of magical performance that do not depend on actual belief in the existence of spirits, miracles and related phenomena: entertainment based rather on sleights of hand, tricks and conjuring.
His detailed history of the evolution of magic-related practices draws on the philosophies of John Locke and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, but he particularly favours Locke’s pupil, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Considered during his lifetime to be a deist or even an atheist, the Earl, whom During presents as a postmodernist before his time, distinguished between ‘bad’ magic and ‘good’. For him, bad magic meant ‘enthusiasm’ when it leads to fanaticism and intolerance. Presumably this bad magic would include religious ‘miracles’ and other events promoting blind faith. Good magic served a benign purpose in that ‘sublime ideas and passions “too big for the narrow human vessel to contain” will always reach out beyond the natural and the knowable towards the divine’, even if this no longer requires ‘supernatural inspiration’. For Shaftesbury, the best defence against fanaticism is ‘a nurtured lightness of mood’. During believes this nurtured lightness of mood will be crucial in his understanding of ‘modern magic’. Furthermore, Shaftesbury showed an appreciation of popular entertainments, thus rejecting the hierarchy of taste between high art and low culture. In other words, Shaftesbury is ‘a neglected cultural theorist’ who appreciates ‘the lightness and fun (to use a favourite term of the later eighteenth century) of a profane popular culture’.2
The Romantics further developed the attitudes that open us to an understanding of ‘modern’ magic. Coleridge called for the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in the audience faced with fictions involving supernatural or otherwise magical seeming events; Shelley thought of visions and seemingly supernatural appearances as a manifestation of the human imagination, and During argues that these new understandings amount to a secular reconfiguration of our relationship both to belief and to fiction.
The distinction between ‘credulity’ and ‘disbelief’ is sharpened and hardened even as fictional entertainments extend their reach and ambition. On the one hand, attempts are made to render religious belief more rational and to avoid the spectacular excesses of miracles and religious superstitions, but at the same time popular entertainments, many relying on the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, develop rapidly in the fast-growing industrial economy and the society of consumption, making use of advances in technology to render their effects more ‘believable’.
Simon During also distinguishes between fictions of the real and fictions of the true. Fictions of the real are performances; a conjuring show would be an ideal example. They are illusions. Fictions of the true, by contrast, represent the truth of belief and experience. The nineteenth-century novel in its serious description and exploration of Western societies, its psychological depth and social analysis, represents the fiction of the true. During believes that these have been exhaustively studied, while critics have neglected conjuring and other kinds of entertainment based on the manufacture of illusions. He aims to redress this balance and to give ‘modern magic’ the respect it deserves.
During attempts this by developing a critique of what he calls ‘compensation culture’, the idea that the magic of modern secular culture is a compensation for the loss of the sacred. Theodor Adorno, in his Aesthetic Theory, for example, believed that art performs this compensatory function, so that art almost becomes a kind of religion. But he also held that the whole structure of seemingly rational capitalism was actually irrational and full of its own baneful magic and illusion. For Adorno, mass culture was an important dimension of the disenchantment and falsity of the capitalist world order, the sense of loss experienced in the disenchantment of a world ground down in the ‘iron cage’ of the bureaucratised state. For During, this Weberian idea and Adorno’s pessimism are misguided in failing to recognise ‘the spread of pleasures, competencies and experiences that flourish within the modern culture of secular magic’, and because he also fails to understand ‘the capacity of modernized individuals to fall almost simultaneously into enchantment and disenchantment … at their own leisure and pleasure, with little subjectivity – or political agency – engaged’.3
Perhaps Adorno is too pessimistic about modern culture and perhaps he is also too optimistic in his belief that modernist art can reveal the truth and dissipate illusion. It does not necessarily follow that During is not also too optimistic when he so wholeheartedly celebrates the eclecticism of contemporary mass culture. He also does not acknowledge that mass culture has eliminated or at least marginalised many of the forms of entertainment that he rightly wants to celebrate: the circus, street entertainers, jugglers, magic lantern shows, ventriloquists and conjuring itself.
During offers a detailed account of the development of conjuring and related forms of ‘entertainment magic’ from the late seventeenth to the twentieth century, charting the rise of this culture as opportunities for new forms of urban leisure expanded and an urban audience greedy for novelty and excitement grew. In the Victorian era commercial interests also propelled the search for novelty, as magic became big business. These ‘magic’ entertainments, as well as being derived from older forms of magic and the supernatural, drew on popular science on the one hand, and spiritualism on the other. Trick mirrors, optical illusions and electricity were some of the scientific methods used in the production of magical effects; at the same time, During argues, the entertainment business undertook a ‘crusade’ against spiritualism, unmasking its fakery and thus advancing the cause of secularism. That this was not as successful as During implies is suggested by the continuing appeal of spiritualism, even today. Fortune-tellers and psychics flourish, even if they have abandoned the startling theatrical performances beloved of the Victorians; they have moved away from their connections to entertainment and towards the world of therapy. (However, Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black, [2005], described the seedy side and credulity of this world.)
Most importantly of all, magic performances led at the close of the Victorian period to the emergence of film. By the 1880s, John Maskelyne and David Devant were the stars of the magic entertainment business. In 1882, Georges Méliès visited London, where he ‘haunted’ Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall, ‘England’s Home of Mysteries’, in Piccadilly. Devant and his projectionist, C. W. Locke, showed ‘animated photographs’ as part of their entertainments. These inspired Méliès to make further experiments in this line, but although he was the first successful maker of films, he retreated in the face of the swiftly developing new techniques, since he disapproved of filmic illusions that did not announce themselves as such. Film was beginning to blur the boundary between illusion and reality.
During devotes a whole chapter to the question of whether there is a literary equivalent to secular magic as a way of considering the relation of magic to the wider culture, but incomprehensibly fails to explore the development of cinema. Perhaps it would have felt like a too daunting extension of his investigation, but a discussion of film would surely have opened up questions central to his project. But film, which uniquely can blend During’s ‘fictions of the real’ and ‘fictions of the true’, is far from invariably ‘light’. It would have undermined During’s commitment to a view of the ‘lightness’ of ‘secular magic’ and therefore his whole thesis.
In any case, almost from the beginning, During finds it difficult clearly to demarcate the boundaries between his ‘light’ secular performances and events in which belief in some kind of supernatural power or event creeps in. He is so keen to emphasise the pleasures of popular entertainment that he completely disregards whole areas of contemporary life in which ‘secular magic’ continues to hold some kind of sway. The willing suspension of disbelief of which he writes appears to be distinct from the Freudian concept of ‘disavowal’. Disavowal is having your cake and eating it; it is to both believe and not believe something simultaneously – (‘I know that women do not have a penis, and yet …’). But that kind of disavowal seems rife in contemporary life; from horoscopes to psychics, taking in alternative therapies of all kinds on the way, we moderns seem all too eager to embrace forms of magic that go beyond pure entertainment. They seem to provide some sort of placebo effect for our troubles.
Even more seriously, During makes a distinction between religious faith, and ‘belief’, the latter being ‘a relation to the sense of propositions whose truth we can appropriately doubt’. This implies that we cannot doubt that form of the supernatural brought in under the umbrella of religious faith. The rigid distinction he makes between magical beliefs and religious faith is a failure to recognise the uncertain terrain between the two. On the one hand, magical beliefs stem from earlier religions that were ‘defeated’ (in the West) by Christianity, as Keith Thomas demonstrated in Religion and the Decline of Magic. On the other hand, by ring-fencing ‘faith’, During validates it in a fashion that no secularist could accept and which, more importantly in this context, exposes the weakness of his whole argument.
There is a case for arguing that religions are themselves a willing suspension of disbelief, aided by the often spectacular and theatrical rituals involved. Rather than setting religion aside, it might have been more interesting to explore the common ground between the two. For it is undeniable that ‘entertainment magic’ has roots in ancient beliefs that were taken very seriously in earlier times. Yet in siding in so partisan a fashion with the ‘light’ magic of entertainment, During disavows the continuing importance in an allegedly secular culture of surviving forms of belief in the supernatural. His attempt to make his ‘secular magic’ completely unrelated to any kind of religious or spiritual belief surely cannot succeed.
In keeping with this rigidity, During’s choice of those whose work he discusses is highly partisan. Shaftesbury obviously qualifies because of his interest in the popular; other writers of the period that might have taken a different view do not appear. Much stranger is During’s failure to mention other than passingly the Surrealists, when Surrealism was surely the modern movement above all others that took magic and the occult seriously. But, again, that may be the reason for their omission: that they took it all too seriously for During.
During’s commitment to a resolutely upbeat assessment of contemporary ‘entertainment culture’ prevents him from exploring what is really a more interesting field: the persistence and ubiquity of so many different kinds of superstition, occultism and other ‘deviant’ belief forms alongside both formal religion and secularism. In the end his assessment of ‘secular magic’ is Panglossian in emphasising its pleasures. Even if these are as harmless as he suggests, this central conclusion – that they are harmless – seems banal. This is a shame when his book is so rich in its exploration of many different kinds of belief and unbelief and of many and various literary and aesthetic experiences.